Apollonius of Tyana

Nearly everything told about Apollonius comes from a single book: the Life written by Philostratus around the 220s, at the commission of the empress Julia Domna, some one hundred and twenty years after its subject died. Philostratus claims to be working from the memoirs of a disciple, Damis of Nineveh; most scholars regard Damis as a literary device, and Maria Dzielska's study concludes that a real ascetic Pythagorean teacher underlies the book but that the travels to India and Ethiopia, the miracles and the confrontations with emperors are largely composition.

What is reasonably secure is a first-century wandering Neopythagorean: vegetarian, celibate, linen-clad, a reformer of temple cult and a critic of blood sacrifice, who taught in the cities of Asia Minor and had a considerable posthumous reputation.

The afterlife is more interesting than the life. Because Philostratus's Apollonius heals the sick, casts out a demon, raises a girl apparently dead and departs without leaving a body, he was deployed in late antiquity as a pagan counter-Christ, explicitly so by Hierocles around 300, which drew a book-length reply from Eusebius, and Christian polemic thereafter treated him as a sorcerer. In the Arabic and then the Latin magical tradition he became Balinas, master of talismans, and had a substantial body of Hermetic and talismanic literature attributed to him that he certainly did not write, including versions of the text underlying the Emerald Tablet. The occult Apollonius is a construction of the centuries after him, built on a book that was itself already a construction.

Apollonius had a second career after antiquity, conducted in Arabic under the name Balinus. Late antique readers already remembered him less as a Pythagorean holy man than as a maker of talismans: Byzantine writers describe apotropaic devices attributed to him standing in public places, warding off scorpions, gnats and floods. That reputation travelled east. In the Arabic corpus Balinus is the master of talismans, and under his name circulated one of the most consequential books in the history of esotericism, the Sirr al-khaliqa, the Secret of Creation, compiled around the eighth or ninth century. Its final section carries the earliest known text of the Emerald Tablet, the short cryptic credo, as above so below, that Latin translators would later hand to European alchemy as the summary of the art. The frame story has Balinus discover the tablet in a crypt beneath a statue of Hermes, clutched in the hands of a corpse, which is how a first century Cappadocian wonderworker came to be the fictional finder of Hermetic scripture.

None of this connects to the historical Apollonius by anything stronger than his name and his talismanic fame, and that is the point worth keeping: the figure was portable. Each age rewrote him to its own need, and it was the Arabic rewriting, not the Greek life, that shaped the course of alchemy in both the Islamic world and Europe.